Lou Prato: After 25 years, Big Ten inspires many memories

*The following column appeared in the August 21, 2015 edition of Blue White Illustrated’s magazine. It is written by BWI friend and colleague, Lou Prato, who passed away Wednesday. He was 87 years old.

By Lou Prato

When BWI editor Matt Herb asked me to write a column about my personal memories of Penn State’s 25 years in the Big Ten, I thought instantly of how much my professional life has changed since 1990. 

Back then I was strictly a dedicated Penn State football fan, one of the multiple thousands in the Nittany Nation who not only helped fill Beaver Stadium in the fall but also traveled to the away games near and far. Yet, my perspective was unique. 

I had covered Penn State football as part of the media in the late 1950s and sporadically throughout the ’60s. But after moving to Detroit in late November 1969, I rarely wrote about the Nittany Lions except for covering bowl games and only saw one game at Beaver Stadium – strictly as a fan – until 1983. That’s when I left the Midwest after 14 years and returned east to live and work in Washington, D.C. 

I was a longtime Big Ten football fan, too, and Michigan was my team, going back to the first time I walked into Michigan Stadium as a teenager. Detroit had been a second home since the late 1940s with close relatives from both sides of my family living there. For the first half of the 1970s, I worked in Detroit, primarily as a news executive for a television and radio station. Our radio station was one of several that broadcast Michigan games, and I helped out at home games. We also covered Michigan and Michigan State games for our television sports department, and college football outside the Big Ten and Notre Dame was rarely mentioned on our radio talk shows.

Michigan home games were special, starting with the Friday night media reception. Our station’s play-by-play sportscaster and backup TV sports anchor, Don Kremer, took me under his wing, and we are still good friends to this day. Don brought me into his circle of close friends that included the sportscasters of the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings and a couple of sportswriters from the local newspapers. Every fall, the group, including wives, would travel in an RV to the Michigan-Michigan State game in Ann Arbor or East Lansing, and other Detroit sports people would drop by from time to time. 

The Big Ten Conference was, at the time, so dominated by Michigan and Ohio State that the media referred to it somewhat derisively as the “Big Two and the Little Eight.” I was still a Penn State fan at heart, but it was difficult getting any information about the Nittany Lion football team even in the Sunday newspapers.

In November 1972, I wrote an article for a Penn State game day program about my experience with Big Ten football entitled “A Heathen Among Missionaries.” This excerpt from that piece summed up my frustration:

“You really don’t know what loneliness is until you’ve sat among 101,000 Midwest blue noses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and listened to the silence that greets Penn State football scores. … Three years ago this provincial auto capital placed Penn State football somewhere between an Italian boccia game and Polish soccer exhibition. Now days, at least, they’ve scratched out the soccer.”

Yes, a little hyperbole by your author, but not far from the truth. And keep in mind that this was the early ’70s. Joe Paterno’s team had twice finished No. 2 in the nation, won two Orange Bowls and a Cotton Bowl and was on its way to a Sugar Bowl game against then No. 2 Oklahoma. 

Shortly after Penn State entered the Big Ten, I sent an updated edited version of that article unsolicited to Blue White Illustrated’s Phil Grosz, whom I had never met. He must have tossed it immediately into the trash, because I never received a reply. And that truly is one of my first personal memories on this 25^th anniversary of Penn State in the Big Ten.

Of course, Phil began using me as a contributing writer not long after the publication of my first book, The Penn State Football Encyclopedia, in 1998. As I wrote earlier in BWI, the book eventually led athletic director Tim Curley to hire me to help start the Penn State All-Sports Museum and become its first director in 2001. Ten years later, I have a column in BWI and my seventh Penn State football book will be out this fall. That’s how much my professional life has changed.

When Penn State began competing in the Big Ten, I was an assistant professor of journalism for Northwestern, in charge of a graduate broadcast program in Washington, D.C. In my spare time, I was writing about the media, including a monthly column in the prestigious American Journalism Review titled “The Business of Broadcasting.”

At the time, my wife, Carole, and I were dedicated Penn State football fans, traveling to as many games as possible, home and away. We became season-ticket holders in the fall of 1984, and by 1988 we had a Blue and White van and flew a white flag with the word “Prato” in blue above our tailgates. The traveling continued into the Big Ten, with trips to Lincoln, Iowa City, Madison and Minneapolis added to the excursions to Philadelphia, College Park and the bowl games in Florida. Sometimes we had to fly to see our Nittany Lions play such teams as USC and BYU, but it was worth it to passionate fans like us. And we hardly knew anyone connected with the team, except Paterno and some administrators.

My Northwestern students could not believe my office was decorated with Penn State football photos and memorabilia. Over the years, after they graduated, some of the students joined us at our tailgates at home and away. One of the most memorable times was in 1994 on the Saturday of the now historic game with Michigan at Ann Arbor. However, the “tailgate” was in a 15^th-floor hotel suite in downtown Los Angeles.

This was the nationally televised showdown game against Michigan in mid-October. Carole and I could not be in Ann Arbor because I was attending a broadcasting news convention.  A convention conflict forced me to miss most of the first half when Penn State jumped out to a 16-0 second-quarter lead. As Michigan took the lead, 17-16, in the third period, my suite began filling up with many Penn State fans attending the convention. One of my recent Northwestern grad students who had his undergraduate degree from Michigan had been watching the game with my wife from the beginning and he was ecstatic. He was en route to a TV station in northern California for his first job interview and was one of the few Michigan fans in my room. 

When Bobby Engram caught that 16-yard touchdown pass from Kerry Collins and won the game, 31-24, in the last two minutes, I thought my student was going to jump out the window. Well, Rich Eisen got that job in Redding, and he wasn’t there long before ESPN hired him and turned him into a star. He’s now the lead anchor for the NFL Network.

I have a lot of other Big Ten memories involving Penn State’s encounters with Michigan, and some are not good. I still cannot believe the way Penn State lost the 1993 game at Beaver Stadium on that goal-line stand and the 2005 game at Ann Arbor on that last-second touchdown pass. I still wonder what the officials were thinking in ’93 when they threatened to penalize Penn State early in the game because of the crowd noise. And I still wonder about those controversial extra seconds the officials gave Michigan in the last moments of the ’05 game. That one really hurt, because it ruined a perfect season and perhaps a shot at another national championship.

And how could any of us who were there forget the “Snow Bowl” in mid-November of 1995 when an unexpected 18-inch snowfall limited parking and forced spectators to sit in shivering temperatures with snow all around them? At least the “good guys” won that one, with holder Joe Nastasi scoring on a fake field goal. 

However, that’s not what I remember most that day. Carole and I had sold our home in Virginia and had driven to State College earlier in the week to start looking for a new home. We began waiting along Porter Road at 6 a.m. for the parking lots to open and heard sportscaster Jerry Fisher talking on the radio about the hazardous conditions he had experienced driving in from his home in the Stormstown area. We had never heard of Stormstown, but that grabbed our attention. A couple of weeks later we found our dream home not far from Stormstown – in a rural area about 14 miles southwest of Beaver Stadium – and we lived happily there until this summer when we moved to State College. I still wonder if we would have discovered that house if we hadn’t heard Jerry talk about Stormstown that morning.

There is one other Michigan memory I want to share. It did not involve a game with the Wolverines but occurred at the 1996 Kickoff Classic against USC. We were sitting in the Penn State section at Giants Stadium, and a few seats away were two couples in their 20s wearing USC jerseys. They were the only Trojans fans in the area and they began irritating the Penn State fans from the time they arrived, with their derogatory remarks, booing, taunting, etc. Early in the game, I turned around and asked them why they weren’t sitting with the rest of the USC fans. “Oh, we’re not from USC,” they told me. “We’re Michigan fans. We cheer against all the other Big Ten teams.” That’s when I realized the Big Ten I knew in the 1970s was far different than the Big Ten of the Penn State era. Unfortunately, that twisted philosophy of rooting for Big Ten opponents is prevalent throughout the conference.

In 1990, I had one other strong connection with a third Big Ten school, Indiana. My daughter and son-in-law graduated from IU and turned me into a fan of Hoosiers basketball and coach Bob Knight. But Indiana’s infamous visit to Rec Hall on Feb. 9, 1993, in which it went into the game ranked No. 1 and walked away with a controversial 88-84 double-overtime victory, is not one of my memorable Big Ten moments. Referee Sam Lickliter blew a crucial call with the Lions on the verge of a major upset, but I didn’t see the game and I don’t remember reading or hearing much about it in the Washington, D.C., media.

When Penn State’s football team began competing in the conference later that fall, I was surprised to learn that Indiana, Michigan and Northwestern were among the four Big Ten teams Penn State had never played before. The other team was Minnesota. 

I remembered several Penn State games prior to 1993 against Ohio State, Michigan State and Iowa, as well as games against Purdue, Illinois and Wisconsin. What I didn’t realize until writing my first book was that the school’s first game with a future Big Ten opponent was at Ohio State in 1912. That game ended in a controversial forfeit when the heavily favored Buckeyes walked off the field in the fourth quarter because they were getting physically beaten up and were losing, 37-0. Additional major upsets over Ohio State followed in 1956 and ’64, and by the time they met in their first Big Ten game in 1993, Penn State had won six of eight games with the Buckeyes.

That 1993 game in the dreary late-October swirling snow and mud at Columbus was a portent of things to come in the Ohio State series, which is now owned by the Buckeyes, 17-13. The Nittany Lions were thoroughly beaten, 24-6, and we fans who were there were harassed continually by the Ohio State fans, another revelation of how the atmosphere on the road would be far different in the Big Ten than it had been as an Eastern Independent.

Nothing was more gratifying to fans like me than the rematch the following year, in which Penn State demolished Ohio State, 63-14, on a sunny Homecoming afternoon at Beaver Stadium. What I remember most was not the game itself but being introduced to the family of the Buckeyes’ losing quarterback, Bobby Hoying, in a nearby restaurant after the game. Carole and I entertained two close friends from Dayton that weekend, and they knew the Hoyings. They said we just had to meet the “nice, friendly” Hoying family. Let’s just say it didn’t go well, and if looks could kill, I wouldn’t be writing these words. 

I could fill a column just with my memories of Ohio State games, some much more unpleasant than the Hoying encounter, including clashes with other Prato family members who are big-time Buckeye fans. When it comes to Ohio State, I’m still a Michigan fan, even though my dislike for the arrogant Michigan followers is just behind the Buckeye horde and some Iowa yahoos.

We had our first taste of unpleasantness in Kinnick Stadium in the second game of the 1993 season, but it was worse in 2008 when Iowa upset the Lions with a field goal on the last play of the game. That was the longest ride home for Carole and me. We hurried out of the stadium seconds after the field goal and didn’t stop except for fuel until we checked into a hotel in Elkhart, Ind., after 1 a.m. 

The frustrating loss to Iowa that night almost equaled Minnesota’s Hail Marys and winning field goal in the last two minutes that knocked then-No. 2 Penn State out of national championship contention in mid-November 1999 at Beaver Stadium. That shocking defeat still remains my worst Big Ten memory, although seeing Adam Taliaferro lying motionless on the Ohio Stadium field in 2000 and then being strapped down and wheeled away was more emotional. Oh yes, seeing Adam walk through the Beaver Stadium tunnel a year later in the opening game of the 2001 season would have been one of my best memories. But I had to watch “the miracle” on a hospital room TV after becoming dizzy and fainting during the pregame tailgating (and no, it was not caused by alcohol). 

I can’t end this column without mentioning the two Rose Bowl games and the 4 hour, 39 minute triple-overtime marathon that was the 2006 Orange Bowl. Once again, my best memories of those games are not of what happened on the field. 

During that 1994 broadcasting convention in Los Angeles that I noted earlier, Carole and I drove to Pasadena to see the Rose Bowl stadium for the first time. A few weeks later, we made reservations with longtime Pennsylvania friends to stay at the same hotel and spend several days together. We also were going to tailgate with Ira Miller, another Penn State Daily Collegian alum who at the time was covering the 49ers for the San Francisco Chronicle. Ira also had the contacts to get us the tickets for the game and the Rose Parade. This was to be another dream come true for a couple of dedicated college football fans.  

Unfortunately, my wife wound up in a Virginia hospital and could not make the trip. She insisted I go on without her, and being the loyal husband that I am, I followed her orders. Ira threw a great tailgate with a lot of his friends stopping by, including Penn Staters like Tim Curley and Richie Lucas. The next year, I had Carole’s unused game ticket framed and gave it to her as a Christmas present. Luckily, I ducked when she suddenly gave it back to me. (Yes, I still have that ticket.)

After missing the 1995 Rose Bowl game, Carole was excited when we returned to Los Angeles in late December 2008, this time as part of the Penn State media. Two days before the game, she was thrilled when we had a special backstage media tour of the Rose Bowl parade floats. Once again, Ira Miller had obtained seats to the parade, and this time we knew they were prime seats, in the first grandstand where the parade begins with the TV cameras beaming it all across the world. 

Carole also was with me for the various news conferences for both teams at the media hotel in downtown L.A. We were in the middle of everything. She took an instant dislike to USC coach Pete Carroll, but that was natural for such a passionate Nittany Lion fan. After the last news conference on New Year’s Day, the Penn State group gathered in the media room to watch a Nittany Lion basketball game on television. 

Shortly after midnight, we both woke up vomiting with our heads thumping. That was the beginning of our 24-hour nightmare. We did make it to the parade but were too sick to enjoy the great seats. Instead of tailgating, we slept in our car before and after the game and didn’t have much to eat until a bowl of soup later that night. The next afternoon, while near Disneyland, we learned that several Penn State media members had also become sick, and it was traced to tainted ice cubes in the media hotel. 

Let me end on perhaps the best of all memories. In my last month as director of the All-Sports Museum, Carole and I were part of the official Penn State party at the 2006 Orange Bowl. It was an experience most fans can only dream about. The highlight was the postgame celebration at 2 a.m. in the noisy, jam-packed Penn State hotel suite with Joe Paterno, Franco Harris, Michael Robinson and dozens of other players, coaches, staff, families and invited fans among the throng. 

Never in the past 25 years were these words more meaningful: “We are… Penn State!” 

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